Chapter 115 – Nuille and Lucille
I gave up many things to go where I went. I gave you up. Sometimes I wonder if it was worth it. Then I remember that I met my mother.
— Letters.
Ernest found it weird to wake up to a ruined Lune. In his dream the fortress was whole and shine like soap stone. The dream had been so real that Ernest couldn’t believe in those burnt ruins. Fuilon stood up behind him. She accepted this Lune for what it was: an injured warrior that would recover together with Franária.
Fuilon’s Frontier riders woke up one by one, blinking like they’d never seen this world before. At the top of the broken tower Vivianne took a small folded paper from her pocket and summoned:
‘Nuille.’
The wind stopped in its tracks. Ernest held his hands together and there was a general sensation that something unimaginable was coming closer. Something awe-inspiring, that accelerates the heart and brings the horizon closer to the touch. Thus they remained, the one hundred and three Frontier people and Ernest, paralized in a mixture of expactation and terror.
Vivianne tried to swallow the rancid taste of fear that dried her mouth. To say Nuille turned her muscles into cotton, her blood in a turmoil around her navel. Oh, how she wished to run away from the Mystery she had just summoned.
Fulion raised her arm. She was pointing at a hat that was coming toward Lune. The hat was black and large rimmed, with a scarlet feather on its side. The face under the brim was yet to be revealed, but they could see flashes of green between the black of the hat and the red of the cape.
Nuille crossed the dead town of Lune without hurry and stopped at the entrance of the burnt down fortress. He turned his face slowly from one side to the other. Maybe he was studying those people who hid behind the remains of Lune’s walls. Maybe he found them funny.
He stepped in.
Even if Nuille’s boots didn’t hit on the broken tower’s stairs, even so Vivianne would feel him coming closer. Her blood vibrated at every step like water in an earthquake.
‘You called me,’ Nuille’s voice cascaded down the stairs, stirring the grass and ash.
‘I have a wish,’ said Vivianne.
‘I have a price.’
Vivianne was all on her skin. Her whole brain had melted out of her nose and stretched over her skin, dripping down her hair, on her soulders and neck. Her lips had to touch Nuille. Vivianne moved in spasms. She turned her head to the Mystery, but her legs took longer to obey.
Nuille waited. He didn’t encourage her. His frog head, the huge mouth like a terrible, scaly tear. It wasn’t the weirdness of those features that scared Vivianne, but the power that emaneted from him. To go near Nuille was reaching out for the sun. Vivianne had undressed her skin, her brain, her reason. At the same time, Nuille was looking at her, which made her feel more than human, larger thatn the world and the universe. That was also unbearable.
She could barely sigh against his lips. A thousand years blinked in the that swift tingling ot lips. Vivianne was surprised that she remained alive, that she knew who she was. She thought she had given everything to Nuille in that kiss.
‘Your wish.’
She pointed North. Her words came with the speed of a flower blooming.
‘That no enemy of Franária ever corsses those mountains.’
Nuille turned. His cape mad a red arch behind him, its tip briefly touching Vivianne’s hand. He went away and whoever Vivianne had been before that kiss went away with him.
Later, Vivianne regretted, scolded herself. So many wishes she could make, did she have to wish for so little? She could have asked Nuille to save Franária, to destroy Farheim and Inlang, that he did something about the dragon. So much! Why did she wish so small?
‘Nuille doesn’t allow a wish to end a story,’ Lucille explained. ‘He accepts wishes that begin stories, but never ones who end them. You didn’t wish for something else because he didn’t allow it.’
Lucille had been on the tower when Vivianne finally recovered from her encounter with Nuille. She had fallen on the floor sideways, her knees bent. She couldn’t tell how long she had been there. Centuries, perhaps.
No one had noticed the girl with hair the color of a red fox while Nuille was in Lune, just as you can rarely see the moon when the sun is in the sky. Now she was standing where Nuille had stood, wearing a light blue dress. Her eyes were the color of honey, her face sprinlkled with freckles.
‘Do I know you?’ Vivianne asked. She had seen those eyes before.
The girl (she must be around sixteen) said that, no, they had never met.
‘My name is Lucille.’
‘I am...’
‘Vivianne.’ Lucille took her hand and held it as carefully as she would a wounded bird.
‘You are trembling,’ Vivianne said. Lucille was also crying.
Vivianne’s obvious surprise made Lucille drop her hand and take a step back.
‘I have never met you,’ said Lucille.
‘Are you a mystery?’
‘I d… I don’t know. I travel with a Mystery, with Nuille.’ The name came so easily to her lips. ‘I know what you plan to do. If you wish, I can come with you to the Rock.’
Vivianne was going to search for her brother. Of course she didn’t intend to knock on the Rock’s main door like Alexis and his five hundred soldiers had done. Vivianne planned to go in through the back, crossing the city that was locked inside the mountain. She knew by heart all the maps that Marcus had given her. If she could find a way into the locked city, she could find a way to the current dungeons, which used to be the city’s granaries. Huge ones, capable of stocking food for the whole city and the castle.
Vivianne was not afraid to get lost, she trusted her inner maps, but she was afraid of ghosts and mysteries lurking in the mountain, the reasons the city had been abandoned and locked up. Lucille sounded a little strange, but she wasn’t crushing like Nuille. Maybe traveling with her would be less frightening than traveling alone.
‘Do you want to help me?’ Vivianne asked.
‘I will be at your side,’ said Lucille. ‘Nuille won’t allow me to interfere directly in a story, but I can keep you company.’
‘What about him?’ Vivianne couldn’t bring herself to say his name again.
‘Nuille is busy with your wish.’
‘Don’t you have to go with him?’
‘We travel together. We’re not glued,’ said Lucille. She smiled a boyish smile that finally placed those honey eyes in Vivianne’s memories. The same nose, the shape of the forehead: Lucille reminded her of Pierre.
A dozen questions flourished, but as soon as Vivianne opened her mouth, Lucille closed down and something in her face warned Vivianne against asking any of those questions. Vivianne had learned with the Wraith to recognize which questions should remain unasked. She went quiet.
Ernest and the Frontier messengers made way for Vivianne.
‘I’m going to the Rock,’ Vivianne announced. ‘Ernest, I can’t come with you now to Sananssau forest, but I will join you as soon as I can. If my brother is alive, I’ll bring him with me. Menior, I’m counting on you to recover Vaguilar. Fulion, can you take the suplies you have hidden in the canyons to Sananssau Forest? And we have to find a way to send word to Chambert.
She moved forth, Lucille followed, everyone stepped back.
‘I almost forgot,’ said Vivianne. ‘That second army on the other side of the Wave: it’s been dealt with.’
Warriors of Farheim and Inlang crawled to the top of the Wave like lava running in the wrong direction. The reached the remains of a Deranian watch tower, one of the three Lune had build on the Wave. Today, in front of the ruins, there was a Mystery. A single scarlet feather adorned his large brimmed black hat.
The first soldiers arrived at the tower, each one of them about twice the size of the human-frog creature standing there. They stopped — all at once, the whole army. The lava had found na ocean and hesitated. To burn forth was no longer na option.
Nuille drew a circle in the air with his finger.
‘Enemies of Franária may not pass. Go back.’
Twenty thousand warriors. Massive, skilled, unforgiving. They were born fighting: against freezing hunger, against each other. A mere frog on human egs faced them. Not one of them hesitated, not one sword challenged him. Nuille was no enemy or ally, he was absolute. His voice was a command, a force, a law of nature.
The northern soldiers turned around and went down the mountain. Nuille sat back against the rock on top of the Wave, pulled his hat over his enormous wet eyes, and napped.